


The Edge Case

by reconditarmonia



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Post-Knife of Dunwall, The Void
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-10 12:21:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15291429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/pseuds/reconditarmonia
Summary: Billie dreams after leaving Dunwall.





	The Edge Case

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kay_obsessive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/gifts).



> I was so excited to get to write for you after interacting with you on FFA! I hope you like this story.

In all her dreams, Daud plunges the blade into her chest, and she chokes and drowns on her blood, knowing in the dream that she accepts this. The world gets smaller and darker — all the districts that they could have run her to ground in, all the back alleys that could have seen her overpowered at twelve by thugs or twenty by Overseers, all the rooftops where she could have missed her footing on a rainy night, are eaten from the edges inward like a building crumbling, until even the sky above her head is black, and there’s only her hand on Daud’s sword arm and his resting on her shoulder as her blood and her powers drain away into the Void.

When she wakes with a start, in a smuggler’s hold and then in a dusty Karnacan tenement, her throat is raw and her skin covered in sweat. She learned long before ever meeting Daud not to scream herself awake, when a part of her watched, made helpless by sleep, as her world was taken from her — Deirdre murdered, her city teeming with pursuers and betrayers. And then, sometimes, the Serkonan dandy riding away alive with both his eyes, or her own face in a cracked mirror, old and careworn in her twenties from looking after her mother.

Those kinds of dreams, the ones that aren’t memories, have always left her the worst, and these days she gets out of bed feeling blinded or wrapped in cotton wool, as if something about her world really is smaller and hazier. It’s her powers fading, she knows. The first time in years that she’d come up short on a transversal, as she made her way to the docks, she put it down to the lingering effects of the Overseers’ music playing through their territory, but she was soon forced to admit that her own treason was slowly leaving her earthbound. Now it’s her vision and hearing, too; they’re still better than most, but to her they feel less sharp, and that other sense of where her brethren are and what they’re doing, hard to name as touch or hearing or taste, is gone. 

She doesn’t like the feeling; it’s crippling, lonely, unfair that the skills she honed over nearly ten years were never hers.

In Karnaca it’s too easy to slip back into old habits. She picks pockets, robs houses, knifes the occasional lover for a jealous husband or the occasional cruel husband for a wife. It’s always been what she’s good at, even without the powers. She could have her own gang, if that had ever been what that whole business was about. But it’s not the new life she was hoping to find when she left Dunwall, and knowing that her best days are behind her leaves a sour taste in her mouth. She hasn’t lived long enough to spend the rest of her life waiting to die.

For a lot of things, it doesn’t matter much who’s on the throne. People like her were doing what they do before the assassination, the regency, long before the rat plague, and the restoration hasn’t ended that. So when the smuggler that brought her to Serkonos comes back into port, Billie is waiting for her on the docks, to see if there’s a job.

She looks at the gloves Billie still wears; without the mask and coat, they’re ordinary work gloves, like sailors or Eels wear, and she asks, “Worked on a ship before? Why didn’t you work your passage over, you wanted for something in Dunwall?”

She could tell the truth. They don’t know her face, and she doubts a smuggler would have any moral objections to a price on her head, without any other detail. “No. Just looking for a change of scenery. I’ve never done this, but I learn fast.”

It’s better out on the sea, where the boundaries of her world are both the walls of the ship and the edges of the map. For all that she’s lived longer than her years, she never left Dunwall until Daud banished her, and Karnaca, as much as she saw of it, wasn’t much different. Out here she sees the beaches of Cullero, the marble cliffs of Redmoor, the ice floes of Tyvia, and then goes to sleep belowdecks without watching her back. Slowly, she learns to read the winds and tides. She hears whales singing in the deep at night, and sees one once. It’s some distance from the ship, gently surfacing and blowing out spray, but she suddenly feels with a shiver that she’s closer to the Void than she’s been for months now.

She should have known that she couldn't run for long. The first time she sets foot back on land in Dunwall, her boots landing with a soft sound in the riverbank mud, it’s to follow the sewer inland from their usual cache, and she senses right away that something’s up. Her face feels naked without the mask in a way that it hasn’t since she left, even if some part of her that wasn’t too blind or mad to see it must have realized that signing on would bring her back here. But it’s not the chill damp on her cheeks and eyes, or even the prickling feeling that she might be watched, that makes things different now; it’s another sense that draws her on into the maze, so that she scarcely needs the map.

Billie almost has to laugh when the contraband they’re picking up turns out to be a crate of bone charms. Seems like the Outsider will find her, whether or not she’s looking. The captain sifts through the charms dubiously. “Seen these before?”

“Yeah. I knew a guy who collected them, once. They’ll be worth the money.”

She doesn’t have much time. Once they’re out under the sky again she’ll have missed her chance, and she’ll have no excuse to go back. There, beneath the earth of Dunwall, she tries to tether a small chipped stone, not six inches from her, to her hand as she crouches to lift the crate. All at once she wants it with a force strong enough to snap lives together like magnets, as badly as when she was sixteen, the power newly poured from Daud’s hands into her own for her to prove herself with, back in another life. At his side, he’d said, she’d take down the world’s masters. Do this, and the world will be right.

The stone won't move. Billie doesn't even remember how to try harder. She hadn’t had to for years before her betrayal, with how natural she found it, and the way her gut twists at being so close again and still having nothing makes her realize she’s not as ready to give that up as she thought. She was still waiting all this while, she realizes, for the Outsider to speak to her. To show her that, after all, she was meant for bigger things than hauling crates to a smuggler’s ship; to make her special.

On their return to Karnaca, she takes her cut and buys a bottle of Dunwall whiskey, the cheap nasty stuff, then scouts for low walls and ledges and ladders until she can climb hand over hand up to a roof overlooking the Grand Canal. It’s not hard for someone with her strength, but she’s not used to stretching her muscles to get a view anymore, and it’s not the view she’s used to. As the sun sets slowly, she drinks some whiskey, wincing from both the harshness of the alcohol and the immediacy of the memories the taste recalls, and pours some out, letting it pool on the flat roof and drip from the edge. She’s killed the last mark she’ll kill for coin, but she was meant for bigger things than this — than Dunwall, than the Empire. 

The cargo they picked up in Dunwall isn’t their last. Though rumors swirl about secret shrines in Dunwall Tower and purple light in small, high windows at night, about parlor séances among bored nobles, magic is still the province of outlaws; the transportation of bone charms from the rebuilding ruins of Dunwall to the workers of Karnaca, of runes from the coasts of the Empire to Dunwall, of whalebone out of Morley, falls to smugglers like her, and as they increasingly often carry a box or two of charms alongside uncustomed wine and tobacco or fenced goods, she rises in the captain’s estimation. She doesn’t bother with most of them herself. Without the powers, Daud had said, they’re no more a conduit of the Void than an iron nail for luck or a caul against drowning; they might help her, but they won’t get her to where she wants to go. 

Billie knows how close the Void is, as close as a reflection in a mirror, or as the ocean to the water’s surface. It has many doors: she’s watched Daud kneeling in a trance at the Outsider shrines, heard the witches of Delilah’s inner circle mutter about a painting they could walk through. Every coastal village they anchor in has some tradition or other of sleeping with oxrush under your pillow on the first night of the Month of Songs to see your future wedding in the Void, though she laughs at those, like Daud laughed to find an Outsider’s mark tattooed on the arm of one of their targets as they searched her body. People like them know what’s just a superstition.

It takes years of searching through the Empire, but one of Billie's contacts tells her, finally, about a labyrinth built before Karnaca was Karnaca, and a pharmacist who can give her what she needs to walk it. A poison, taken from a Pandyssian fish, but one that will give her visions if she doesn’t take enough to kill her. She settles her affairs, just in case, then finds the entrance, strata and strata deep beneath the Aventa; puts three drops of the poison on her tongue, and walks into the labyrinth. The stale air makes her lantern dim and flicker, and the walls of the labyrinth breathe and melt and crystallize. She keeps walking until her lantern goes dark and the paths bleed into one.

She wakes in the Void.

She knows it’s not a normal dream, because under the rooftops of the Flooded District the world falls away; she walks across the roofs and bridges, her footsteps on the corrugated metal echoing through the silence, and instead of brackish water below her there’s a blue abyss, with the shadows of whales deep down. Something draws her on, like she’s felt before, but stronger: the whole vastness of the place, more than her mind can comprehend, is thick with power. This is where it all comes from.

Gaps she’d normally transverse — normally have transversed — are spanned by bridges the Whalers never built, made of paving stones and gutter pipes and rail track, more floating than secured. She realizes, crossing a bridge that she does remember, that the bridges they built most likely don’t exist anymore, as Dunwall puts itself back together and cleanses itself of its various scourges. So this is the Flooded District of her memories; no wonder the streets and buildings she remembers, now crumbling into the abyss below, are the Void’s raw material. No wonder she’s being led somewhere.

Billie spies an open window one building ahead, and takes a running jump to the roof so that she can swing down into it. Her heart stops for a moment as she realizes too late that there’s no floor below, and falls. She lands on what should have been the opposite wall, the world righting itself, and she’s in the gazebo at Dunwall Tower, with the Void beyond instead of the Wrenhaven. Empress Jessamine and little Emily are looking at her frozen in fear and horror, and Corvo Attano floats above her more like a body in a river than anyone she’s ever tethered in life, the usual greenish light of the power tinged blue. Daud’s not here yet, but it can only be a matter of moments.

She waits, but nothing moves. Looks at Jessamine’s face, at Emily’s. It wasn’t her who stood here the day they killed the Empress — who was it? Thomas? — but it may as well have been her. She lets out a breath, and lets Attano go; his body floats upward through the window in the top of the gazebo and vanishes in the fog. She turns back to Jessamine and Emily, who still watch her in terror. There’s nothing she can do here, nothing she can change, so she climbs down over the railing of the gazebo and finds herself standing on a roof again.

Billie continues on, listening to the humming in her ears and feeling the singing in her bones grow stronger. She’d worked magic for the first time in years, she realizes. Instead of crossing the next bridge, one made of bankers’ desks and coin, she reaches out with her powers to the roof opposite and seizes — then she’s there, almost overbalancing because her body doesn’t remember how to account for how easy it is, struck with joy and relief.

She reaches the Chamber of Commerce, moving quickly between rooftops as the paths between them fall away unneeded, and hesitates before peering down through the broken roof of Daud’s office. Nothing is there: not Daud, not the room, not the building. On an island far below she sees a gazelle-topped coach, its door just ajar. She could drop down, as lightly as snow, and snap its passenger’s neck. Or she could close the door, knock twice on the coach’s side to send it on its way.

But she doesn’t see a sure way back up. The island itself is almost shrouded in blue fog, and it’ll be too far to transverse back. The Void might reshape itself, give her a path off the island into whatever unknown life it can show her, but she knows deep down it’ll never take her back to the Flooded District. Billie Lurk the assassin, the rooftop walker, the Void channeler, isn’t the person who saved Deirdre. She sits for a moment on the broken edge of the roof, looking down and letting the memories of Deirdre’s hands, her smile, her hair mingle with the Void like blood in water; then stands again to continue to where the Void is bringing her.

She sees the frozen scene here, and a low ache of recognition settles into her bones; she should have seen that this was where she was heading all along, back to the ruined room open to the sky where she knelt to offer herself to Daud’s blade. In the end, she’s died here far more often than she’s been spared. Only now, she doesn’t kneel at all. The other Whalers vanish; when she looks back at the Chamber of Commerce, it’s gone, as the world narrows to her and Daud.

She’s dreamed of killing him before, too: the chances she didn’t take to challenge him for leadership, even once to walk past his guards and cut his throat in his sleep. This is something she hasn’t dreamed, fighting him with Delilah’s powers that feel twisted and hateful as roots under her skin, but that she wields as easily as the ones she gained from him. A sick part of her loves this all the same, the fighting, showing her skill, drawing on the Void. She’s missed it, even if the powers aren't exactly the ones she wanted back. Short of death, Daud will never yield to this challenge, she knows; she can’t prove her mastery of his own powers like this. She can’t tell if the thing she sees in his eyes, as they chase each other, is fear or pride or contempt. 

When she kills him, it’s with thorns fired from her hand into his back, like she’s pulling them from her own body, and she stands there, more alone than alone, as he bleeds. She walks over to him, the floor crumbling behind her, so that it’s just the two of them on a tiny island in the vast Void. She turns him over and his lips move, but she can’t make out what he’s saying. As his blood runs down her hands, the final pieces of the floor drop away, and she falls through the blue and the black, her body draining out of the powers just as she dreamed of them draining away but in reverse, to wake in the labyrinth.

She’s never seen a world where she didn’t betray him.


End file.
